CMS Tactics

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2011-01-26T14:56:00.001-08:00

BeeHeard Next Release (version 1.4.4) News

2010-02-19T16:04:00.001-08:00

Last week development on BeeHeard which may be released as version 1.4.4 began. There are a few enhancements that have been implemented from users' feedback that were suggested in the Feature Request category and others that were sent in via email. Last week we finished the free version of BeeHeard called BeeHeard Lite which has limited functionality so that users and administrators interested in testing out BeeHeard on their site can install the Lite version and see it's how easy it is to administer from the front-end as well as finally see the back-end and it's features.

The Lite version has the following limitations:

* Up to five categories
* Subcategories NOT featured
* 10 suggestions per category
* 15 comments per suggestion
* Three votes for guests per category
* Five votes for registered users per category

What is now being called BeeHeard Full Version due to it not having the above mentioned limitations and to differentiate from the Lite version has had the following improvements implemented and will be featured in the next release:

* Added functionality to display user's name or username depending on the format specified in the configurations for either Jom Social or Community Builder. Now if you don't use any of those great social networking components then you still of the option to display the user's name or username.
* Option to display or hide the copyright in the footer of the component.
* Added the "Rejected" status label for suggestions.
* Added the feature to display the number of categories and the number of suggestions for the Top, New, Accepted, Work in Progress, Rejected, and Completed items in the top navigation menu if enabled.
* Added a little bit of CSS to make the top navigation tab display the current tab by making it pop up a little bit.
* Fixed the Allow Suggestions when creating a new category in the back-end to default to 'Yes'.
* And finally a major improvement that has been in the pipeline from the beginning of this component but has not been implemented until the release of the Lite version to differentiate it in a major way is the ability to allow the users to vote and report while filtering the suggestions by the different status labels. Also, front-end moderators are allowed to edit and delete suggestions while filtering as well.

Lastly, we changed some of the parameters for the Javascript for the voting box that was causing an issue due to some conflict with some developers' templates that heavily used Javascript. The issue was able to be reproduced on a few of RocketTheme's templates. That being said, the voting pop up box now appears to the right of the vote count and link.

BeeHeard Lite has been submitted to the JED and hopefully it gets published soon so that many people who have been wanting to test out BeeHeard but haven't wanted to purchase it can now try it. BeeHeard Lite may work for many small sites and for those who are happy with its limited features and don't mind pruning the suggestions and comments to keep allowing visitors to post suggestions and comments.

We appreciate your feedback so feel free to post feature requests and bugs for BeeHeard.

BeeHeard Thanksgiving Offer

2009-11-25T09:18:00.001-08:00

BeeHeard version 1.4.1 just released in time for this special price offer for the Thanksgiving Holiday. For a limited time only you can purchase BeeHeard for only $35. This includes free support and free upgrades. If you were interested in this component and weren't sure about the value of the component for the price, now is your chance to take advantage.

BeeHeard offers your Joomla! site to a way to capture feedback from your visitors about virtually anything. You have the power to create categories and subcategories to any depth. Decided on the user level you want to have access to create suggestions, vote and post comments.

New features in version 1.4.1:
- Added functionality to allow URL links to be clickable in a suggestion’s details.
- Added option to list subcategories of a category in the category’s details view.
- Added months for created date to language files for translation.
- Added created date to suggestion details.
- Added messages for reporting suggestions and comments as spam, duplicate, or inappropriate.
- Added a character counter to display and restrict number of characters for suggestion title, suggestion details and comment text.
- Added option to enable/disable suggestions for a specific category. This feature is intended to prevent suggestions to be entered in a parent category that has several depths of subcategories.
- Made all columns sortable for Categories, Suggestions, Comments and Votes tables in the backend.

Admin Table Sorting Issue Solved

2009-11-24T10:42:00.001-08:00

The issue regarding rows not appearing when a previous table in a previous view was sorted resulted in the filter order variable keeping the value from the previous view. Therefore, if that filter order for the table in the newly selected view didn't exist, then of course it woudn't sort anything. The solution was to check if the filter order even existed once in the new view. If not, then it would turn to the default sort by id.

BeeHeard Next Release (version 1.4.1) News

2009-11-21T22:17:00.001-08:00

Currently working on finishing some enhancements for version 1.4.1 of BeeHeard which are now in the testing phase. We received some feedback from some users which are being rolled into this release. Roberto Carreón from Joomleros.com supplied us with two suggestions which were making links clickable in the suggestion description instead of having to use html tags and he also noticed an inconsistancy in the vote link URL which did not make it SEF friendly. Another nice feature is the display of subcategories that exist while in a category's detail view and linking to them. Finally, we added messages to be returned when suggestions or comments are flagged as spam, duplicate or inappropriate as well as displaying the number of characters remaining in the input fields for suggestion title, suggestion description and comment text.

As for enhancements to the backend, we made the columns in the tables for categories, suggestions, comments, and votes sortable. There is an issue that is occurring regarding the sorting of columns in which it rarely does not show any information in the table until the data is sorted by clicking on one of the column headers. Nevertheless, the data is sorted properly. We followed Joomla's specification to accomplish sorting but still don't know why this is occurring. We will run more tests for this as it isn't a big issue but would like the release to be consistant and not have slight issues such as this occur.

One bug that was fixed that was of a limit of only twenty categories, suggestions and comments being displayed on the page at any given time. This was due to a conflict with a future feature of having pagination (refers to dividing a document into multiple pages) for a predefined limit. We removed the limit and now the component will display all categories, suggestions and comments.

Google Workshop

2009-11-19T13:20:00.001-08:00

Today I attended a free Google workshop presented by Market My Biz Online for business owners to see if I can learn anything new that I haven't learned already on my own by performing research in trying to gain more traffic to my sites and earn more money.

The audience seemed to be of an older and less technically inclined than I had expected. Nonetheless, I did learn a few things. Here is a list of what I took notes on as tasks for me to accomplish:

- Submit URL to smaller market search engines as well (ie, AOL and Ask). I already hit up the bigger ones, Google, Bing and Yahoo.
- Submit business to maps to attract local business.
- Claim local business on Google, Bing and Yahoo and have it verified.
- Have Gmail account specifically for my business to tie all analytics, webmaster tool, etc. Currently using my personal email. How did I not do something as elementary as this from the beginning?
- Look into what robot.txt actually does and if useful then apply to sites.
- Utilize keyword searches to add keywords to sites.
- Be more descriptive for page titles.
- Omit click here’s as the link and make the title the actual link.
- Investigate what syntax for naming images is best and name images and alt tags for all images on my sites. I am guilty of having titles such as logo.jpg or cmst_logo.png. This will help on image search results.

The rest of the content that was discussed was targeted to educate business owners that are looking into creating websites or currently have websites to take advantage of the tools that Google offers. These tools include Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Keyword Search, etc. This workshop was driven to obtain business for this marketing company since many people would rather pay someone to perform these tasks and possibly purchase ads from these search engines to promote their business but it did supply valuable information to those who weren't aware of how crucial this can be to promote your business or site.

Using PixelPipe to Stay Connected

2009-11-18T15:25:00.001-08:00

Now that I'm trying to advertise and market CMS Tactics and BeeHeard, it has been frustrating trying to keep track of posting information on several blog sites, updating twitter accounts, facebook status, etc for both personal and business use. PixelPipe seems to be a good tool to be in one spot and broadcast to all my avenues of information. I'm new to this site and I hope that I can figure out how to do a lot of things that are readily available for each account. Nonetheless, I think I will embrace this for its features and ease of use to get my word out. Hopefully, this will allow me to focus development work since the time to market/advertise should be reduced.

BeeHeard Joomla Feedback Component Giveaway

2009-11-18T13:37:00.000-08:00

Looking for a Joomla! feedback component for your site? If so, BeeHeard supplies a cohesive component to your site in which users can create suggestions to categories, vote on the suggestions and post comments to existing suggestions. BeeHeard also integrates well with JomSocial and Community Builder.

If your Joomla! site can use such a component, please contact me with information about your site, the site’s url and how it will be used. Our goal is to give this component away to a few sites that can benefit from this component.

BeeHeard Joomla! Feedback Component

2009-11-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

BeeHeard is a Joomla! component developed by CMS Tactics that allows users that visit and use your site to provide feedback based on the categories listed. This easy to use component allows users to post suggestions to the categories that are published. Users can then vote on the suggestions and post comments to the suggestions. There are many features that allow you to control who is allowed to create suggestions, vote and post comments.

BeeHeard Activity for Jom Social

2009-11-18T10:07:00.000-08:00

BeeHeard Activity for JomSocial is a plugin that displays the user's suggestions and comments from the BeeHeard feedback component in their profile.

BeeHeard Activity for Community Builder

2009-11-18T10:06:00.000-08:00

BeeHeard Activity for Community Builder is a plugin that displays the user's suggestions and comments from the BeeHeard feedback component in their profile.

BeeHeard Feedback Module

2009-11-18T10:03:00.000-08:00

BeeHeard Feedback Module displays feedback from the BeeHeard component in a module where you can customize the content to display.

The module has the following options in which you can customize:

Customize message text
Choose whether to show suggestions from all categories or select suggestions from a list of existing categories.
Choose the number of suggestions to display.
Display Top Voted or Most Recent suggestions.
Show the status of the suggestion.
Create a link to the list of categories or to a specific category.
Customize the text of the link that gets displayed.
Choose to show the BeeHeard microphone logo.
Choose whether to show the number of suggestions in the link.